OK, so we know that Joe the Plumber was a plant; the guy wasn't even a plumber (although you'd never know that from the media's continuing use of that meme).
Today I had to have a major pipe replaced in the house. Our plumber is a teeny but wiry woman named Barbara. She's an amazing plumber as well as a smart, politically savvy mom who took over the business from her father after he died of prostate cancer.
She hadn't been here in two years, and the last time she was here she chatted up my mother, who recently died.
So today I got to chat her up during a break.
So the first question she asked me on her break (she was here for 9 hours today) was who I was going to vote for. Here on Long Island that can be a dicey question. Just around the corner are quite a few McCain-Palin signs, enough to intimidate a friend who wanted to put up her Obama sign, since the McCain people are so angry and fearful this year that she was afraid of being vandalized.
Anyway, Barbara asks the question, and I tell her that of course I was voting for Obama. She replied, "who else would you vote for this year!" - rolling her eyes at the thought of the idiots around the corner with the McCain signs.
It turns out that among other things Barbara was offended by the Joe the Plumber crap coming out of the McCain camp, having pegged him as a phony from the beginning. First, he didn't have the right "look." Second, nothing he said about his supposed business expansion sounded like it was plumbing. Third, what kind of a plumber is a Republican anyway?
Then she proceeded to tell me how Bush has screwed up the economy in this country to an extent that we're not fully aware of yet. How anyone could vote for somebody like McCain, who would just continue the mess, in this environment was just baffling to her.
Joe was a fake. Barbara is real.
Real plumbers vote for Obama.